There was a phase in my blogging life when I was running about four different blogs simultaneously: a wargaming blog, a roleplaying game blog, a blog chronicling my attempts to paint the contents of the first two Reaper Bones Kickstarters, and a blog detailing my solo wargaming using the game All Things Zombie by Two Hour Wargames.

Interestingly enough, it was the last of those that seemed to catch the spirit of gaming culture at the time. The Walking Dead was blowing up big time, zombie miniatures were cropping up everywhere, and the attention and detail I put into the battle reports was, if I may say, impressive. It was also a chance to do a little fiction writing vis a vis the battle reports, a genre I don’t dabble in much, if at all.

But Hard Boiled Zombies was also, personally, a painful thing to do for very personal reasons. In ATZ, you’re encouraged to create an alter ego for yourself and imagine your own adventures in the zombie apocalypse, and so I did. But I also began to incorporate friends and relatives in the game as well, including my wife at the time, whom I called “Irene.” But after over a dozen campaign entries, the game entity Irene was killed by zombies, right around the time the real life Irene and I began having marital problems (the irony was not lost on me at the time). It was poignant and sad to realize that I was writing a fictional version of my wife getting along better than reality, my enthusiasm for the game waned and I ended up leaving the whole campaign on a cliffhanger. Eventually, the real life Irene and I would divorce years later.

The blog would get an odd post when I would have a glimmer of re-interest, but it never really got any steam going. There was a little bit of interest on my part in 2019, but the real-life pandemic made gaming a pandemic seemed a bit much for some reason.

Now it is 2021, and two things have moved the planets into alignment to restart solo zombie wargaming. First, the pandemic is distinctly entering a new phase with vaccinations and the like restoring some semblance of our emotional normality. Second, a local gamer decided to move to another state and sold his entire Zombicide collection for a mere pittance.

Over 100 miniatures, including about a dozen survivors. Just the thing to get an ATZ campaign up and running again. So I picked up my brush and have been getting some work done.

So a project, a game, and a revitalized blog all in one. I’ve learned some things, though, and will be keeping the real world/game world environments firewalled off from each other. Feel free to go over to Hard Boiled Zombies to see how this endeavor develops, plus I will be posting regular digest entries here.